City of Virtues: Nanjing in an Age of Utopian Visions by Chuck Wooldridge (review)

Reflecting on the possible significance of a series of troubling events, including the devastating 1848 floods, severe drought, and the 1842 menace of imminent attack at the conclusion of the Opium War when the Great Qing surrendered to British terms, the literatus Yao Ying 姚瑩 (1785–1853) noted that the fortunes of Nanjing and the greater empire were driven by currents of qi 氣: “It multiplies and divides, of itself waning and waxing. … it sometimes responds [to the affairs of people] and sometimes does not” (p. 71). Nephew of the Tongcheng School writer Yao Nai 姚鼐 (1731–1815) and one of the officials responsible for the execution of over 200 British subjects shipwrecked on Taiwan in September 1841 and March 1842, Yao Ying had unimpeachable philosophical and practical bona fides as a fierce defender of Qing sovereignty and power. As such, he queried whether “the appearance of disasters and anomalies … [result from] a dynasty’s period of decline” (p. 71). His answer was decidedly mixed. Should monarchs and great ministers govern appropriately, calamity will be avoided, and “heaven and earth will care for the people” (p. 71). Should leaders fail in their scruple and

if the afflicting qi transgresses to the point of [causing] evil, only a sage can eliminate it. As for those people who become ministers of state, whether their virtue declines or revives, if agitated qi takes advantage of the situation, there will be rebellion.

(p. 71)

The Taiping Rebellion was yet to break out. Yao Ying therefore observed the human and natural terrain closely, in optimistic ignorance of the near future, for signs whether Nanjing’s efflorescent imperial qi might empower leaders to maintain peace and security.

Chuck Wooldridge’s City of Virtues: Nanjing in an Age of Utopian Visions places Yao Ying’s preoccupation with the qi of Nanjing—and its possible implications for the fortunes of the greater empire—in conversation with similar reflections by a succession of local literati, Qing officials, and the Qianlong emperor (r. 1735–1796). Per the metaphysical dictates and aesthetic sensibilities of imperial Confucianism, Wooldridge’s actors are wont to view and interpret the city through the elegiac pingdiao 憑吊 mode of seeing. Cognizant of the lingering traces of past events and the interplay between cosmic forces and human beings, these actors read the natural geography, human society, and edifices of Nanjing as auguries of political and social conditions.

Virtue (de 德), as both a moral value and a powerful force, formed the crux of their political and social calculus. Exercised by the state and local elites through correct governance and local charity, virtue was also fostered by the enactment of Confucian ritual (li 禮), including state sacrifices performed by the emperor himself that honored the loyal and righteous dead as well as the semiyearly sacrifices to Confucius. On the one hand, ritual divided into distinct registers appropriate to the emperor, officials and literati, and the general populace. Yet, on the other hand, it simultaneously provided a common praxis for people at different levels of the social hierarchy to act collectively toward a distinct, Qing imperial vision of the good society. Ritual and the moral economy of virtue played a role analogous to that of citizenship in the aftermath of the 1911 Xinhai Revolution.

Wooldridge invites us to reenvision Nanjing through the eyes of an ardent Qing literatus as a composite natural-, social-, and built-environment suffused with transcendental energies and significance. From this perspective, the city’s late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century vicissitudes are revealed as metaphysical drama. City of Virtues examines literati concerns with the ebb and flow of virtue in Nanjing over four politically challenging periods: the late eighteenth-century Qianlong apogee of Qing power; the self-reckoning of the Jiaqing and Daoguang periods; the Taiping interregnum; and the age of post-Taiping reconstruction and successive waves of reform.

Wooldridge interrogates Qianlong’s reviews of troops and sacrifices at the...